Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Details of the Working Group III portion of the IPCC AR5 were officially released yesterday (Last Monday, only the Summary for Policymakers was posted at the IPCC websites.). The IPCC's take of calculating costs (levelized) and emissions (lifecycle) of power generating technologies was included in the report.In the following figure, the IPCC WGIII differentiated the LCOE of each power-generating technology according to high and low full load hours (FLH). FLH is the number of hours that a power plant runs at its full capacity and is generally calculated on a per-year basis. A power plant's FLH can be converted into its capacity factor, too. For example, the capacity factor of a 5000-FLH power plant is 57.1% (5000/(24*365)).Within the same technology, the LCOE of the power plants with high FLH operating conditions is lower than that of those power plants with low FLH conditions.Note: Specific numbers for the figure are provided at Annex III (Section A.III.2) of the report.Source: IPCC WG3 AR5 at http://mitigation2014.org/